Monday, July 29, 2013

". . . for we act in total ignorance and yet in honest ignorance we must act, or we can never learn for we can hardly believe what we are told. . . " (Norman Mailer, The Deer Park, Ch. 24)

This past month I've run into the notion of "nihilism" three times, at least. The first was in that quote from David Foster Wallace's The Pale King about giving advice. His father[The father of one of his characters] saw self-pity at the root of nihilism. The second occasion was in trying to find a sentence I remembered from my reading of Camus' The Rebel. ("The truck, driven day and night, does not humiliate its driver, who knows it inside out and treats it with affection and efficiency.") I finally found it in close proximity to his thoughts about how to move "beyond nihilism". The third was in a comment to Andrew Gelman's post about his recent piece in Slate about why we shouldn't always trust statistical studies with sensational headlines (like "Women Are More Likely to Wear Red or Pink at Peak Fertility"). Commenter "jb" took "the implicit take-home message [to be] rather nihilistic".

I get jb's point, and probably feel it more radically still. When I read (or write) critiques of particular studies in the social sciences that draw titillating conclusions from pretty flimsy datasets, I feel profound despair about the state of knowledge. Research, especially research about the human animal, seems to be driven by the headlines it can produce more often than the rigor it can achieve. (Making it into the mass media has become a kind of epistemological criterion. It confers additional credibility.) Fortunately, as Andrew pointed out soon after, there are stories where rigor trumped the quest for headlines too. But one is still left with the feeling that much of what we "know", i.e., think we know, about human beings is trumped up, i.e., has little or no evidence to support it.

That's the sense of "nihilism" I'm after here. That there is "nothing" behind the claims made by social scientists—at least often enough to undermine our trust in anything we hear from the social sciences until we check out the particulars ourselves. The "take home message" will be "nihilistic", in jb's sense, if we draw the conclusion that we can learn nothing about people except what we learn for ourselves. That is, even where social science provides a reliable method by which to approach an issue, it provides knowledge only to those who actually apply that method or have the competence (and access) to check whether others have applied it. In short, you can have "scientific" knowledge of society only if you, yourself, are a social scientist. The scientists cannot be trusted.

I'm not yet entirely ready to accept that conclusion. The personal and political consequences are simply too staggering to me. In a philosophical sense, however, I'm willing to consider the idea that the social sciences ultimately "have no object", that there is "nothing", no thing, there to refer to. People, whether alone or in groups, are not things. Society has no "objective reality". But it does have a no less important subjective ideality. Perhaps this is where nihilism can be transcended, albeit at the cost of becoming utopian. Much to think about.

"Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it’s not that you’re pretending to be someone else. You’re pretending to be exactly who you are. That’s the curious thing."